On Monday 06 December 2010 06:10:02 linux-lvm-request@redhat.com wrote: > > I need more extents to move stuff off older, possibly failing IDE disks > > to my new SATA terrabyter. However, not enough extents are available. > > The disk is very sparsely populated. > > > > > > > > Is there any way to "condense" physical volumes to recover/expose empty > > extents in order to make use of them? > > Is your situation actually the following?: > > The volume group is nearly full, meaning that most all > of the extents are used by logical volumes. > > On those logical volumes you have file systems. > > Those file systems have free space. > > If the above three conditions hold, you'd need to: > > reduce the size of the file systems, perhaps using ex2resize. > > Once each file system is reduced, you would then be able to reduce > the logical volume which contains that filesystem. > > That will mean there are free extents in the volume group, so you can > then use pvmove to move the extents off of the chosen physical > volumes. That's about it. Reducing the size of logical volumes was the first thing I thought of but it wants to umount them to do this--not so cool if they are /usr and stuff like that. I suppose this could be done using the Debian live CD. Either /usr or /home could easily be shrunk leaving plenty of extents for the pieces still on an IDE disk. > > Does pvmove --alloc anywhere help? > > Alternatively, you can specify exactly which extents go where, > like in "pvmove --test -n lvname.to.move /dev/pvold:20-27 > /dev/pvnew:732-739". obviously, remove --test, if it seems to do what you > meant. > > To see which what is where, and which extent ranges are free, > I tend to use variants of > pvs -o vg_name,lv_name,pv_name,pvseg_start,pvseg_size,seg_pe_ranges > -Opv_name,pvseg_start Note that pe_ranges are inclusive, (end of the range > is: pvseg_start + pvseg_size -1). I am not really conversant in the CLI tools so I do not know how to do this. The only free exents are on a PV I created out of a partition which I had intended for another use. I pmoved the stuff from one of the IDE disks to this PV. A bit scary but worked fine despite problems with that IDE disk (which was then removed, thankfully). _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
